Another overcast day.
Dull gray, dark grey, light gray, and the occasional patch of vivid blue. Perfect for a trip to check out one of the tea fields of the Cameron Highlands. Not too hot, not too cold, not too rainy, not too sunny. Pretty much the whole reason I had come to this place in the middle of the mountains, Malaysia. Tea.
A decent trip by bus from KL (Kuala Lumpur), something like 3.5hrs in the most ideal of conditions, the MOST ideal. And last I checked (a minute ago) it only cost 35RM, so about $9US. I think it was much cheaper when I went...way back.
The towns name is Tanah Rata
Which translates to flat ground, and is literally the only flat ground in the area of any note. From my research to refresh my memory, it doesn't look like it's changed from the one street affair that I experienced. Maybe a little bigger as people realize how amazing the area is to get away from everything, especially for travelers looking to tuck themselves away for a minute. I wrote a little bit about it in another post, Memories from abroad -Getting lost in a jungle.
It wasn't hard to find the plantations.
There are four in the area, but only two I remember going to. The first was the Boh Tea Plantations. They had a great tour of their plantations and the facilities. There was a lot of information about their operation and tea in the area...if I find the images from that tour I'll put together a post on it. But the plantation pictured here is the Cameron Valley Tea Plantation (Bharat Tea Plantation). They didn't have a tour that I remembered. But you could walk pretty easily through the fields and they had a couple different amazing views where you could sit, chill, and enjoy the view with a cup of...you guessed it...tea. But they also had coffee.
A bit of info on the plantations...
The one with the tour, Boh Tea Plantations, grow 4 MILLION kgs of tea a year, which is like 5.5 million cups a day. Crazy, right? That's a lot of tea. About 70% of the total tea that all of Malaysia produces. They've got two plantations in the Cameron Highlands and if I remember correctly, they do a lot of work with Lipton. The blackberry citrus tea I got from the souvenir shop sticks in my head, with the big Lipton logo on the side.
Bharat Tea Plantation is apparently the second largest grower in the country. The plantations location making it more tourist focused with those tea houses and hikes I mentioned before. Still no slouch when it comes to growing on either of it's 2 plantations.
Sitting with that cup, alone with my thoughts
I once again couldn't help but chuckle a bit. Like a bookmark in my memory, I have that instant recall of just sitting there wondering, 'wtf?' The air was this lovely mixture of warm and cold, unsure what to be, other then angry and ready to drop rain whenever and wherever. My nose was filled with that odor so specific to growing, a ruddy green and brown, tinged with that sharp floral of a good tea in front of me.
Getting lost in a jungle, eating cinnamon bark off of a tree while watching out for poisonous snakes, flowers that smell like dead people, tea fields, that random Google search that brought me here was definitely paying off.
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